Penn Highlands Update 8:10 pm
As more Pennsylvanians continue to get the COVID-19 vaccine, Penn Highlands officials said they’ve been able to reduce some of their operations.
“As more people get vaccines within our service area we have been able to decrease some of our COVID operations by reducing hours or actually shutting things down such as our inpatient COVID-units,” said Megan Bussard, Assistant Vice President of Penn Highland’s Physician Network.
Bussard said Penn Highlands currently has seven positive COVID-19 patients on the inpatient side of their health system.
She said these numbers are great compared to the spike in December where they had 80 COVID-19 hospitalizations and in April with 30.
Pa Vaccination Timeline 10:53 pm
As part of the state’s accelerated phased rollout plan starting today law enforcement, firefighters, grocery store workers, food & agriculture workers are eligible to receive vaccine.
On April 5th, all residents in Phase 1B will be eligible to receive the vaccine then on April 12th all residents in Phase 1C will be eligible to receive their vaccine.
On April 19th, all Pennsylvanians regardless of their phase designation can receive the vaccine.
The Secretary of Health saying that the recent approval of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is allowing the state to get through these phases.
“So we have really been able to be in a different playing field than we were in January when we talked about Phase 1A and really growing it at that point. The supply projections and especially with the increased approval of the Johnson vaccine have allowed us to more quickly accelerate what really was our planned progression for many of these phases